English Language Arts/ Research
Symposium: English Education in an Artificial World
Various English educators consider what the advent of “intelligent” technology means for ELA education and the ongoing pursuit of equity and justice.
(Re)Active Praxis: Dominant Discomforts: Reflections on Our Attempts to Queer English Teacher Education
In this essay two English language arts teacher educators reflect on their efforts to live out a queer anti-oppressive pedagogy and explore tensions in navigating emotionality and discomfort.
Research: “So, you’re not homophobic, just racist and hate gay Muslims?”: Reading Queer Difference in Young Adult Literature with LGBTQIA+ Themes
Reading moments of classroom talk as text we explored how prospective teachers in a Teaching Diverse Young Adult Literature course read and responded to Michael Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores a text with a Muslim LGBTQIA+ theme. Thinking with queer theory—and its constituent concept homonationalism more specifically—we examined how discourses of difference both liberatory and oppressive were shaped as notions of collective acceptance tolerance and inclusion intersected with interpersonal contradictions and contingencies. Using critical discourse analysis to trace how the “queer Muslim other” was indexed in conversation we highlight the promises and pitfalls of leveraging diverse youth literature as students examined and extended the privilege of personhood through the particulars of a single text.
All in a Day’s Play: How a Child Resists Linguistic Racism and Constructs Her Identity
Set in one of the least privileged neighborhoods of the US Southeast this research project took a discourse analysis approach to construct a day-in-the-life case study. It illustrates how during an after school storybook cooking class a 7-year-old multilingual Mexican American girl navigated local linguistic microaggressions and extended microaffirmations to her peers. At the same time she contested and critiqued societal power imbalances associated with whiteness. This study widens the corpus of scholarship that has primarily examined children’s sociodramatic play and literacy development in preschool settings. It also broadens the body of research that has predominantly focused on students’ linguistic dexterity and metalinguistic awareness in middle and high school contexts.
Editors’ Introduction: Multimodal Research for Racial Justice
In Dialogue: Mapping Our Truths—Envisioning the Future of Multimodal Research for Racial Justice
With funding from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Marva Cappello Jennifer D. Turner and Angela M. Wiseman convened a group of critical multimodal scholars in April 2022 to initiate a national agenda that prioritizes the use of visual and multimodal methodologies to promote educational equity and racial justice for youth of color. Our conference gathering included Reka Barton Darielle Blevins Justin Coles Autumn A. Griffin Stephanie P. Jones Alicia Rusoja Amy Stornaiuolo Claudine Taaffe Tran Templeton Vivek Vellanki and Angie Zapata. The dialogue presented in this article centers around a collaboratively composed image (see Figure 1) created three months after our initial convening. Participants from the conference chose an image that reflected our time together and represented our hopes and dreams moving forward. Inspired by kitchen-table talk methodology (Lyiscott et al. 2021) we share our ideas through images and text reflecting on how critical visual and multimodal methodologies facilitate access equity and hope in education and educational research.
2022 NCTE Presidential Address: Equity, Justice, and Antiracist Teaching: Who Will Join This?
Experiences of Alienation and Intimacy: The Work of Secondary Writing Instruction
Drawing on critical theories of labor and commodification this qualitative embedded case study explores how students experience alienation and intimacy in the work of writing for an English language arts class. Analysis of fieldnotes from 30 observations student writing products and reflective interviews with focal students and the teacher illuminated the meaningful assemblages where conditions of intimacy permeated instruction. Two practices supported intimacy in working conditions: knowledge about writing built through a collective process of noticing and open-ended work time characterized by “managed nonmanagement” (Tsing 2015 p. 176) or calculated flexibility in rules and expectations. Findings illustrate how a literacy practice might contribute to students’ experience of alienation or intimacy (or both) while writing depending on conditions of industrialization and commodification. Even as the teacher strove to deindustrialize work commodification through grades and standardized assessments heightened alienation in the writing environment. The study provides an example of an educational context governed by an industrial system of assessment where local actors (the teacher and students) disrupted alienation by working in smaller scales and more closely with texts.
Agency, Identity, and Writing: Perspectives from First-Generation Students of Color in Their First Year of College
This paper highlights the perspectives of first-generation students of color in their first year of college and the ways in which they exercised agency in their writing. Framed by definitions of agency as mediated action that creates meaning the paper reports on qualitative data collected from a summer writing program for first-generation students and students of color and from writing samples and follow-up interviews with six students who participated in the summer program. Findings suggest that students in their first year of college leveraged their social and discoursal identities to offer new ways of understanding an issue. They also wrote using a translingual approach integrating different discourses and forms of knowledge and challenging views of academic writing as monolithic. The findings also suggest the link between awareness and action meaning that what and how students wrote were informed by their awareness of writing and awareness of themselves as writers and cultural beings. The study’s findings have implications for advancing more nuanced views of agency and academic literacies and redesigning writing instruction at the high school and college level.
Laying the Foundation for Imagination, Resistance, and Political-Ethical Becoming: Announcing the 2021–2022 Alan C. Purves Award Honorees: The 2022 Alan C. Purves Award Committee
Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English
Research: Exploring Trends in a Growing Field: A Content Analysis of Young Adult Literature Scholarly Book Publications 2000–2020
To understand trends in what seems to be an explosion of books written about young adult literature (YAL) the authors conducted a content analysis of scholarly books published between 2000 and 2020. The question What trends in YAL research and pedagogy do the books published in this span of time reflect? guided this inquiry to support English teacher educators in their engagement with YAL scholarship within and beyond teacher preparation. After examining 191 books with the majority of them focusing on research and theory in YAL findings emerged in five areas: critical events in society shifts in public education literacy movements publishing trends and scholarly community influence.
(Re)Active Praxis: The Possibilities of Community-Based Partnerships for English Language Arts Preservice Teacher Education
In this article we reflect on the potential of involving preservice teachers in pedagogical experiences with community-based organizations to cultivate all students’ genius and criticality (Muhammad 2020). Drawing on our (re)active praxis as teacher educators we examine our work with two preservice ELA teachers who planned and taught a critical literacy curriculum at a community-based site. By (re)imagining teacher education beyond traditional university and school classroom walls we consider the possibilities of bridging university-community contexts to develop our own implementation of critical pedagogies.
Research: “I want them to see writing as a joyful thing to do”: Noticing Texts as Equity-Oriented English Education
In this article I consider how pre- and inservice educators notice texts they enjoy in their daily lived experiences and how this positioning may support an attention to equity-oriented English education. I focus on texts that educators working in professional roles ranging from literacy coaches to elementary and secondary ELA teachers to administrators notice in their daily experiences. Drawing on a curricular assignment in a writing pedagogy course I consider how educators relate the texts they find interesting to their own understanding of equity-oriented writing instruction. I examine for how teachers consider the texts of their lives and how such attentiveness might help them build humanizing equity-oriented curriculum with and for students. I also seek to disrupt the overwhelming emphasis on writing as what is needed to pass a standardized assessment. This alignment toward enjoyment may support English educators as they in turn support and view students and their languages and literacies as worthy and brilliant.
Walls, Bridges, Borders, Papers: Civic Literacy in the Borderlands
This article reports findings from a qualitative study in a third-grade classroom in the Southwest in the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign and inauguration. In response to students’ concerns about Trump’s rhetoric around immigration and border-wall construction the teacher provided curricular space for students to study immigration policy and write letters to their congressional representative expressing their positions. Drawing on field notes interviews and student writing this study asks (a) What sources of knowledge did students draw on in their talk and writing? and (b) How did students respond to such curricular design? Analysis suggests that students drew on border thinking (Mignolo 2012) and politicized funds of knowledge (Gallo & Link 2015) positioned themselves as change agents and developed and displayed knowledge of academic genres and conventions.
The Continuum of Racial Literacies: Teacher Practices Countering Whitestream Bilingual Education
An equitable education for linguistically minoritized and racialized-Othered youth fosters their biliteracy and critical consciousness about racial ideologies. Yet little is known about how or whether secondary-level dual-language bilingual-education programs and teachers seek to enhance students’ critical consciousness—especially as a means of grappling with racist ideologies. Drawing together literacy and race studies in education I theorize a continuum of racial literacies then employ it to examine dual-language curriculum and instruction practices. I use interview and classroom-observation data to reveal that a racially diverse dual-language program offered more racial-literacy practices on the hegemonic end of the continuum than the counterhegemonic end. Using teachers’ practices as an index of their program’s stance on racial literacy I argue that the program provided a whitestream bilingual education: it offered biliteracy schooling through hegemonic racial-literacy practices that perpetuate white supremacy. The teachers’ successes and challenges speak to the need for structural attention to resources training and program-wide support for critical-racial-literacy practices. I conclude the article by joining calls for bilingual education to enhance youths’ critical-racial consciousness adding racial to signal the need to be intentional in teaching about and countering racism colonialism and imperialism.